Charles Carreon: Wow! What an asshole!

We have been following the Oatmeal vs Funnyjunk.com* war for the past few weeks. If you haven’t heard about it by now, here’s the gist. Funnyjunk has been republishing Oatmeal content for years now without permission. In fact, it rarely even attributes the source. Oatmeal then complained. How does Funnyjunk respond to be exposed as a copyright infringer? By trying to shakedown Oatmeal for $20,000!. Here is Oatmeal’s explanation of the situation:

Remember FunnyJunk? Almost exactly a year ago I published a blog post about my comics being stolen, re-hosted, and monetized on FunnyJunk’s website. The owner of the site responded and some of the comics were taken down, He still had a ton of my comics hosted without credit, but the energy it would take to get him to take them down wasn’t worth it. I thought the issue was done and over with so I let him be.

A few days ago I was served papers informing me that the owner of FunnyJunk is going to file a federal lawsuit against me unless I pay him $20,000 in damages. You can read the full letter here.

The owner of FunnyJunk hired Charles Carreon, a lawyer who became famous in the 90s after successfully litigating sex.com. Charles does a bit of modeling too, apparently.

I don’t want to get tied up in courtroom nonsense. I don’t want to pay more money to my lawyer. Don’t you miss the days when I posted 2 comics a week, instead of writing rebuttals to Forbes and dealing with bullshit like this? (Source)

The Internet then quickly raises almost $200,000 for Oatmeal’s legal defense. Oatmeal quickly announces that it will donate all of the money to two non-profits. So what does Carreon do? Does he slink away as he should? Do he and his client crawl back under their respective rocks?